


Half Of Something

by wishwellingtons



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Glasgow, Journalism, Journalist Malcolm, M/M, Politics, Pre-Canon, Rain, Roman Catholicism, Seminary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 05:38:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12314829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: A sad standalone love story set largely in the Glasgow rain.





	Half Of Something

Malcolm had brought Jamie in to stop him going to prison or selling radical socialist Catholic pamphlets of his own illiterate invention (and esoteric design) on street corners. He had a little congregation of the homeless, the one-legged, laughing kids and street animals, and an auld military boy whose scrambled eardrums meant he thought Jamie was advocating the establishment of a martial state. There were also a quorum of blonde girls, art school and more-or-less punk, generally taller than Jamie, whom Malcolm mistrusted more than any other women in his life. Jamie had a bicycle that seemed to have arrived pre-chewed, a dog collar, a black encrusted attempt at an ear piercing, and a rotating system of alarmist cardboard signs.

 

Malcolm chose not to explain why he (he: finished, whole, vulpine, complete) thought  _all this_  would make a journalist.

 

 

*

 

The rain was pissing down, and Jamie began folding up the cardboard before he left the bike, unlocked ("I've had it blessed," he growled, and to Malcolm's deep unease,  _there it stayed_ ) outside the cafe where Malcolm explained his political strategy, his prayer-free propositions, and Jamie drank four cups of black and treacly tea. Jamie had pointed out he couldn't write, even slightly (and indeed, his sigil-like typography bore this out), and Malcolm insisted that was what sub-editors were for.

 

Stealthily, Jamie went back to the seminary and consulted not the many well-thumbed tomes of lore but the illustrated children's book of saints his gran'd passed his way. Squinting sideways via flashlight, he conceded with a smouldering ash of satisfaction that the poncey fucker  _did_  resemble this pen-and-ink John the Baptist, which all fitted in with Jamie's Messiah complex and Jamie's susceptibly to Ladybird Books.

 

The fathers missed the clear tenor of their curly-headed and youngest recruit at morning Mass. Malcolm hoped that Jamie would never sing again. He'd stopped by his last service, intending to sneer at misplaced, and the sound had nearly killed him. He'd gripped the pew with all ten digits and seen, as if in black smoke, the conviction that converting this blue-eyed boy from a corded and consecrated life was truly an evil thing. Another verse or bar, and he would have broken from back to front.

 

But fifteen minutes later, Jamie was swaggering down the Leith road with nine cans of own brew and a leather jacket, looking after girls like a cartoon dog. Malcolm went from feeling like a pimp to a maiden aunt in the space of an hour. It would become familiar.

 

 

*

 

 

By the evening he'd bought Jamie forty cigarettes and installed him in a damp cavity (it didn't even merit  _alcove_ ) beside his own high-ceilinged bedsit. He told a suspicious landlady (Mrs. Kotovsky-Carlyle, a Russian-Scottish exile whose husband had smoked himself to death at Yoker and left her to tenant their tenement) that Jamie was his own half-brother, a statement which both physiogonomy and the little fucker's gladdening glad eye made increasingly difficult to believe. Jamie, still collared, brought with him his virtues out of the wind and the rain. Impressive in a diminutive sort of way, he laid hands on her scabrous and fluid-filled knee, something which Malcolm couldn't see without wincing, and dared Malcolm with a glowering gaze to challenge her when the widowed professed much relief.

 

Upstairs (he had the tread of three tall men carrying a ladder), Jamie entered his hellhole with the joyous determination of a child, and got to work transforming it into a push-in, pull-out blanket fort and roadside shrine to very specific TUC heroes, his late gran, and Jolson. Overnight he had a screaming nightmare and kicked a hole in the wall. By the morning, he'd patched it up with a cutout of Blessed John Maclean, and brought Malcolm a cup of sloppy tea. Malcolm looked up into his starved-rain face, his rat king hair, and the bluest eyes that ever made a glad man sorry, and knew he was fucked. "The auld girl's done us a fry," Jamie said, and he smelt like rain and fags.

 

And then they went to work.

 

 

*

 

 

Malcolm realised he was in love with Jamie halfway through the second morning. The first day had been too taken up with diverse negotiations, second to fifth thoughts, and certain behind-office-doors-with-people-important-enough-to-have-offices editorial compromises pursuant to allowing 'that thing' to join and remain on the payroll beyond lunchtime. Malcolm had glanced, seething, back at Jamie, chatting up the one girl reporter not officially designated a militant lesbian, and felt an odd mangling of his cardiac effects. He mentally brought forward his editorial coup by half a year, and took Jamie out on his first story, a fucking boring funeral of an auld yin in Motherwell to which - it was hoped - Jamie might add some clerically colourful prose.

 

In later years, Malcolm was still unsure how they'd gone from that to 'Fuck the pigs' to organising a lock-in in the auld yin's half-brother's married daughter's pub, but by eleven o'clock that night, Jamie'd spilt beer over Malcolm's fifeen hundred copy, kissed the widow, and was declaring in rousing tones that being a journalist was  _great_. Malcolm knew, there and then, that he had to take Jamie out to the privy and drown him as a three-legged puppy, face down, until he stopped moving. Instead, Malcolm found himself standing alone in the ginnel, staring down a smoking match with a cold and unresponsive moon. He denied that his hands were shaking.

 

When Malcolm went back in, Jamie had ensconced himself in a coven of war veterans, including one toothless octogenarian known only as Paw. Malcolm knew all about Paw: Paw had lost his left hand at nineteen in a day at Vimy Ridge. General opinion was that he'd also left his tongue.

 

Now Jamie'd got him talking (whistling through his scaffolded stumps of his teeth, in fact), with Paw's yellow eyes wet in the smoky beerlight, and silky stump, veined and clawed in its own right, resting on his midget, detective hand. Malcolm never forgot the glow about Jamie, or the respectful silence as, hushed only to the edge of talk, standing mourners nursed their beers and heard the worst, a little narrative of a Spring grand slam, and Holy Monday on the Douai Plains.

 

It was either God's purpose or an audacious manipulation by the devil himself. Jamie had yet another cigarette clamped in the corner of his bloody beautiful mouth, and gave a truly liturgical shake of his head. "Fuckin' atrocious. And only three weeks to Remembrance Day." His eyes sought Malcolm, and Malcolm hated himself for responding, unmastered as he was, to the fact of His Master's Voice. "Here, Malc," he called, "Can you come and write this down?"

 

*

 

Jamie fell asleep on Malcolm's bed mid-dictation, leaving Malcolm awake cutting nine thousand words to two. Before breakfast he was down the lane calling Sara, a nice Jewish girl who still lived at home and was only a Trotskyite at weekends, to offer her time-and-a-half if she'd take all Jamie's copy by phone and save them from libel. Sara (who pledged the first but not the second - she was a subeditor, not a worker of miracles) was engaged to Beneit, a tall printer with whom Jamie'd somehow found time to agree football for the Saturday, and Malcolm found himself itching on the phone for an unnecessary minute, tempted by the overlong temptation to discuss with her what exactly was giving him such grief in the guts, every time he looked Jamie's way.

 

Jamie looked disgustingly rested on four hours' sleep and had left Malcolm the lion's share of hot water. When he returned, Jamie was feet-up on Malcolm's bed, reading through Malcolm's clippings, tortuously slow, with something like awe.

 

"You're fuckin' brilliant, you are," he said, toast and coffee and a window's worth of Morningside sun on his back. And Malcolm's heart gave one, final, affirmative thump.

 

And they went to work.

 

 

*

 

 

It took Malcolm halfway to the office to realise Jamie was wearing his shirt, and instead of shouting he nearly toppled into the gutter, which - all sun being over - was running black gushing treacle and overtaking them down the street. "I've not got  _two_ , unless you want me back in the collar," Jamie bellowed, commandeering (again) much of Malcolm's umbrella (he'd got not  _one_  of those), and ignored Malcolm's hectic volley of abuse to grin a better grin than his upbringing deserved. The black water splashing his collar, Jamie beamed up at him. "Am gonnae be just like you," he observed. "Just fuckin' like. That one you did on the social, and all the guid stuff about those bastards on the council, all ae that. Not just auld yins in bars and pussies up trees." They were standing still now, charming tableau of young Marxists on a cobbled hill, bedraggled and bewildered, one discomfited and one quite certain. "And I'm gonnae get m'ear pierced again," Jamie murmured, sheltered by Malcolm's umbrella, and shaking rain off his psychotic anorak (embryonic form) onto the stones at Malcolm's feet. "Fuckin' fantastic."

 

And then he climbed the steps on Renfield Street and Malcolm was left with his heart hanging in the bottom of his stomach. A shower of rain became a rainbow as he turned in, unseen, and at ten o'clock that morning, watching Jamie learn to still not know how to touch-type, all the pieces of Malcolm's life fell suddenly and soundlessly into place. In Jamie he had found more than a disciple; there was a clarifying key.

 

For the next four years, it would absolutely be enough.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from "Then I Met You", The Pretenders' greatest song. Jamie's political and religious pamphlets were inspired by Alan Bennett's The Lady In The Van. I do hope you enjoyed it. I realise its sudden appearance may have been slightly surprising.


End file.
